Re: Agents and MIB Design

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>]

>>>>> Chris Petrick writes:

Chris> Is it common/good design to find code managing a MIB Object
Chris> 'table' reference data in another MIB Object 'Table'.  For
Chris> instance, one table contains information about clients that
Chris> have registered with the SNMP Agent and a second table uses the
Chris> first table to determine where on the network to send Traps or
Chris> Unsolicited Responses to.

Not sure I understand the question. But it is in general unavoidable
to have reference relationships between MIB tables. There are
different ways to model the inter-table relationships. A relatively
powerful mechanism are tags as used in RFC 2573, especially given the
example you cite above. Which mechanism is best for modeling a certain
relationship between tables depends on the circumstances (and this is
why good MIB engineering is a kind of an art).

Chris> Is it good practice to use Octet Strings as indexes for a
Chris> Table?  If so, do most Network Management Applications have the
Chris> ability to take a text stirng input from the user and convert
Chris> the string to dotted ASCII sequence for sending to the Agent.

String indexes have become more and more popular over the years. Some
management applications may still have problems to deal with them
correctly. But this is probably just a sign that the application is
not worth the money. ;-)

Chris> Have you heard of any implementation where SNMP is used query
Chris> information in the same manner as SQL but using SMI?

This idea comes up regularily is really not new. The first attempt I
am aware of was the snmpql project done by Wengyik Yeong at PSI back
in 1990. You can grab the snmpql source which includes a nice paper
from ftp://ftp.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/pub/networking/snmp/misc/snmpql.tar.gz.

Many people have reinvented the basic idea. There are several papers
on this topic and there are even commercial products. Some are
basically ODBC drivers and interpret SQL statements on SNMP agents.

[Please turn off HTML when sending email to IETF mailing lists. Thanks.]

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder      Technical University Braunschweig
<schoenw@ibr.cs.tu-bs.de>  Dept. Operating Systems & Computer Networks
Phone: +49 531 391 3289    Bueltenweg 74/75, 38106 Braunschweig, Germany
Fax:   +49 531 391 5936    <URL:http://www.ibr.cs.tu-bs.de/~schoenw/>